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"When they allow a talk show host to play them like a two-dollar banjo, they demonstrate what kind of backbone they'll bring to the job later on, if we elect them. After they get elected will they continue to allow Jeff Crank to put a nickel in them and wind them up every Saturday morning?"

Barry Noreen, former columnist, Colorado Springs Gazette

Friday, August 19, 2011

PAPER KITES

By

ROBERT HARKINS

Informal: a fraudulent check, bill, or receipt. An illicit or surreptitious letter or note. Archaic: a person who exploits or preys on others. Oxford Dictionary.

The Obama Administration, in less than three years has imposed on the American people a debt greater than that of all administrations since George Washington. While the president continues to blame former President George Bush for the unfolding of this American tragedy, he might with as much justice blame Abraham Lincoln who increased the national debt by declaring war on the southern states. He might also blame President Roosevelt who prevailed in war against Hitler’s National Socialist State and Japan’s military juggernaut after Pearl Harbor.After all, the Second World War certainly created a deficit.

While, President Lincoln preserved a new American Union and President Roosevelt preserved America, Europe and Asia, President Obama has wrecked havoc on the American economy, imposed his will upon the American people, their Constitution; and has created a nation divided against itself. History, however, impeaches the weary, onerous and pathetic speeches wherein President Obama blames former President George Bush for the economy and all else.

Republicans in a dance that would beggar a ballerina’s grace of movement in Swan Lake have agreed to an additional 7 trillion dollars in tax debt over the next ten years—the theory being, we may suppose, that whatever congress and president then runs government will be far better able to pay down a mere 21.5 trillion dollar tax-deficit than is the present congress and president able to pay down a 14.6 trillion dollar deficit.

Fear not however, in the first budget year alone the Obama administration will save as much as 20 billion dollars, or the sum the United States will spend during the time it takes most Americans to finish their first cup of coffee.

As I think about it there may be something to fear after all.The national debt, and its billions in interest payments will not be paid in during our life or the life our children and grand children. It is a nearly unquenchable debt that will reduce American prosperity, quality of life and the once attainable aspirations of American sons and daughters. It is a debt that will savage American business and its ability to compete with the new, vigorous, and ironically, more capitalist nations of Asia, Russia and Brazil. The incurring of trillions in additional debt is that cure which is worse than the disease— because it kills the patient.

As if insurmountable debt were not enough, the President’s Cap Trade ambitions— directed to the eradication of a specious, and scientifically aberrant theory of global warming— will add to the deficit as it hammers into the ground the very businesses which create energy, employ people and increase the tax base. While Congress is against Cap and Trade, a rogue Environmental Protection Agency is imposing it. For those Americans who may have bought the President’s promise that they will be kept safe from all tax increases, there will be for them betrayal, sore disappointment and confiscation.

The president has pitched and still pitches an ambitious and suspect expansion of federal power. Just yesterday he published an executive order which in effect imposes upon Americans the Dream Act, the very Act that Congress will not pass into law and which the great majority of Americans do not want.

In the “quantitative easing” of the money supply, an odious and dishonest euphemism, the president has directed the Federal Reserve to print money. The printing of money is symbolic of an unprecedented struggle for supremacy between two rugged adversaries one the American people and the other, incredibly, their own Government. Most Americans want a Constitutional Republic; its government however is building a socialist regime renamed the welfare state.

What then has been quantitatively eased? Not a thing. The devaluation of money is a crime old as Cane and Able. The purchasing power the dollar diminishes inexorably. The United Nations is calling for the creation of a reserve currency to replace the dollar, as is now China, the same China that is selling off its American Treasury bonds.

The printing of money to finance government services by deficit spending constitutes yet another tax on the American people.This government knows well, as do all governments, new and ancient, the causal connection between printing money, inflation and the confiscation of private wealth — a law of economics equal in force to the law of gravity in physics. This government, however, is more than willing to confiscate wealth by inflating and devaluing the dollar despite the will of the American people.

In 1923, the French occupied the Ruhr Valley where Germany had concentrated a major part of its potent manufacturing capacity. German workers in the Ruhr Valley went on strike. The German government, then nearly bankrupt, paid their wages in marks turned out by the billions on government printing presses. Inflation followed the printing of marks and destroyed the German economy. Germans citizens, desperate to acquire something or anything of value as the mark became utterly worthless, immediately purchased almost anything. Desperate buying forced prices rapidly upward. Nevertheless, a bankruptgovernment continued to print and finally destroyed its currency and economy.

What then did the Germans do with the German mark? Adults tied them into the rough shape of logs which they burnt in their fireplace so as to stay warm through the brutal winters. Parents gave their income paid in marks to their children. The children glued them together in sheets, cut them neatly to fit the crossed wooden ribs to which they tied a cloth tail.

Then running with the speed and grace that only children can maintain, and laughing, as children laugh with such pure and innocent joy, the German children flew their kites high upon the frigid winter winds of a bankrupt German wasteland.

It is a fleeting mercy that tragedy sometimes passes high above the understanding of children.

My new book Renegades, Their Betrayal of America. Her Revolution and Renaissance, is now available in perfect soft cover on Kindle. Please type in the word Renegade and thereafter my name, Robert Harkins. I would most appreciate your patronage. Robert